Four Months Afoot in Spain

by Harry Alverson Franck

The young woman who served me at table and answered the demands for wine of the half-dozen youthful miners about me seemed strangely out of place in such surroundings. Nothing was plainer than that she was not of the barmaid type. One would have said rather the convent-reared daughter of some well-to-do merchant or large farmer. This surmise turned out to be close to the truth. When the carousing miners had drifted into the night and I, by dint of talking and acting my best Castilian, had found my way into the good graces of the family, I heard the girl's story--for rightly approached the Spaniard is easily led to talk of his private affairs. Her father had been the principal shop-keeper of the mining town, and had died a few weeks before. His debts were heavy and when all claims had been settled there remained to his orphaned daughter five hundred pesetas.

"But," I cried, "five hundred pesetas! It is a fortune, señorita, in Spain. You could have started a shop, or lived well until the novio appeared."

"Jesus Maria!" cried the girl, looking at me with wondering eyes. "Do you forget purgatory? For the repose of my father's soul five hundred masses must be said; no less, the cura himself told me; and each mass costs a peseta. Then I have come to work here."

There was that in the air next morning that reminded me, as I wound down into a wooded, well-peopled valley, that summer was drawing toward its close. The day grew quickly warm, however. In the knowledge that the king was sojourning in the city upon which I was marching, I was fully prepared to endure long catechizing and examination by guardias civiles. My wonder was not slight, therefore, when I was suffered to pass through one, two, three villages without being once challenged.

But the expected meeting came at last and quite made up for the lack of others. The third village lay already behind me when I heard an authoritative shout and, turning around, saw a bareheaded man of thirty, dressed half in peasant, half in village garb, beckoning to me with a commanding gesture to return. Fancying him some wily shop-keeper, I swung on my heel and set off again. He shouted loudly, and racing after me, caught me by an arm. I shook him off with an indignation that sent him spinning half across the highway. Instead of retreating he sprang at me again and we should certainly have been soon entangled in a crude performance of the manly art had he not cried out in a voice quaking with anger:

"Have a care, señor, in resisting the law. I am a miñón."

"Miñón!" I cried, recalling suddenly that in the Basque provinces the national guardias are reënforced by local officers thus named. "Then why the devil don't you wear your uniform? How shall I know you are not a footpad?"

"I shall prove that soon enough," he replied, still visibly shaking with the rage of a Spaniard whose "pundonor" has been sullied.

I returned with him to the casa de ayuntamiento, in the doorway of which he halted, and, examining me for concealed weapons, demanded that I untie my knapsack. Never before had this been more than superficially inspected, but the thoroughness with which the angry miñón overhauled it, examining even my letters and fingering my clothes-brush over and over as if convinced that it could be opened by some secret spring, fully made up for any possible carelessness of his fellow-officers elsewhere. When he had lost hope of finding evidence of treason he handed back my possessions reluctantly and bade me with a scowl the conventional "Go with God;" to which I answered, "Queda V. con el mismisimo diablo"--but the thrust was too subtle for his bullet-headed intellect.

Toward noon the green slopes and cool forests turned to a cindered soil and the sooty aspect of a factory town. I mounted a last hill and descended quickly through a smoke-laden atmosphere into Bilbáo. Here was the first entirely modern city I had seen in Spain; one might easily have fancied one's self in Newcastle or Seattle. The Spanish casa de huéspedes seemed not even known by name, and in its place were only boisterous taverns, smacking of sea-faring custom and overrun with the touts that feed on the simple mariner.